The Visitors (15 page)

‘I know you cannot call the Visitors at will. You said so last night, when we spoke of Constance.’

‘Yes. They just appear. But I can make them go. Permanently, I think, if I want to.’

‘But why do they come to you? Do you know?’

I have thought long and hard about this. ‘Truthfully I do not know. I believe I can
see
them because I had my lenses removed, though that does not explain why I had contact with the Visitors before I had my sight. I am no scientist, but I suspect that there is some part of the air, of the fabric of the world, that my eyes can see. A place where the Visitors live. They are always there, but no one can see them. No one with normal eyes. In a normal eye, the lens stops this, protects the eye from it somehow. When I wear my reading spectacles, I cannot see them.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, they vanish, the moment I look through the glass.’

‘You have said they shine with a blue or purplish light.’ Lottie considers. ‘Perhaps there is a part of light in which they live. One strip of the rainbow. The blue part, indigo or violet.’

‘Yes, I like that idea. Creatures of the light.’

‘But to have spoken to them when you were deaf-blind too, you must have some other gift?’

‘Yes, that is more mysterious.’

‘Perhaps it is because you were deaf-blind. Maybe everyone has this ability, but our brains are just too busy to accept it. Perhaps the deaf-blind brain is not distracted, is more open to receive other stimuli, like the Visitors. Perhaps the normal brain rejects their messages as mere thoughts, as irrelevant fancies.’

‘That makes sense,’ I say.

‘That would mean anyone could do it, if only they concentrated enough,’ she continues.

‘Perhaps.’

She falls to biting her thumb again, staring out of the window.

I want to take her hand and comfort her. I have never seen her quite like this. And I think, This is grief. I am not sure that rushing to the cliffs and looking for the ghost of poor Tom Winstanley is the answer. But she is adamant.

When we arrive, we climb up on to the cliff path and walk along the edge of the land. The slate-blue sea faces north to Essex and Suffolk, east to Belgium and the Netherlands. Lottie knows the way as she came often as a child, brought by the vicar who educated her and Caleb. A little weary, I ask to stand a while to get my breath back.

Lottie tells me: ‘We’d come here for history lessons. And geography. We’d chalk our homework on our slates and by the time we got home it would all have rubbed off in our bags. Our teacher was always spouting off about the greatness of the empire, our naval victories and brave explorers. He had a big portrait of the Queen in his dining room and in the hall a Union Jack with a caption beneath: “For God, Queen and Country”. Caleb lapped it up. I thought it was nonsense. I liked coming out here, away from the stuffy schoolroom, the ink and the paper. I liked to see my geography writ on the cliffs hereabouts, not read about it in books. Caleb would gaze out to sea and say he’d go on long voyages one day to strange and wonderful lands. He said he would sail to Madeira and bring home bananas.’

We move on and before too long, she says, ‘Here we are.’

Along the cliffs, russet brown in the afternoon sun, is an imposing ruin, standing sentinel above the boulders.

‘Reculver Towers,’ Lottie tells me. ‘A ruined church, twelfth century. And the remains of a Roman fort and a Saxon monastery. Should be plenty of ghosts.’

I look ahead and luminosity gleams amongst the ruins. I think she is right. If I died here, I would haunt the Towers.

As we near, we peer down across the cliffs to the rocks below, seeking a sign that Tom’s boat was there, a scattering of driftwood, a rope, something. But the sea offers nothing, it just broils and spits and splashes against the rocks and ignores us. Lottie keeps looking round at me, watching my face, trying to see what I see.

‘I will tell you if I see him,’ I say.

‘He was dark, very dark.’

I want to say, I know. I saw him in the water. But it seems cruel.

‘He was tall. Very tall. Broad-shouldered and bearded. Handsome, yes. He was handsome.’

We reach the base of Reculver Towers. There are Visitors here. The more I look, the more I see. The air is blue with them. There are tourists too, worldly visitors, stepping amongst the ruins and sunning themselves, unaware of their phantom companions.

‘Are there ghosts?’

‘Dozens,’ I say, scanning them. They are dressed in all manner of clothing, from modern garb to ancient robes. I have never seen so many in one place. Some are looking at me. Some approach, but I dismiss them. There is only one I want to talk with today. We walk further. I look and look.

Lottie keeps asking, keeps tapping my arm: ‘Is he here? Can you see him?’

We wander around the ruins for an hour or more. Many Visitors come and go. I take to banishing them, to clear the field a little. Women and children first. Then old men. Now there are three men, but one is too short, one too young, one too fair.

‘Can you ask them,’ says Lottie, ‘if they’ve seen him?’

‘They cannot see each other. Remember, they do not know each other exists.’

The three men are roaming to and fro in my orbit, glancing at me from time to time. Trying to begin conversations with me. But I ignore them. None of them is right. I dismiss them all. The hour grows late and the tourists leave too. We are alone.

Lottie’s eyes are melancholy. We sit and stare at the view, the sea fading from sapphire to dark emerald to gunmetal grey to black. The sun has gone behind the cliffs and the air is colder. I worry that there will be no trains, that we will have to walk nigh-on ten miles home, with no food and the Crowes worrying themselves to death as to our whereabouts. But I cannot speak to Lottie about this or anything. I am patient for her, as she has been for me these many years.

Finally, when the sun has sunk and the shadows steal about us and the old stones, she says, ‘Maybe it takes them a while, after they’ve died. Before they make their first visit.’

‘Maybe.’

‘They might go somewhere else, another place, like a waiting room, before they return.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Or maybe they never come back from the sea. Maybe they wander the waves out there.’

‘Maybe,’ I say.

‘It must be terrible lonely.’

Tom does not come. There is nothing I can do to help Lottie. I have stared at the sea so long, it seems as if the land has eroded, that we are adrift on the waves. I believe I am borne away from the days of my childhood and the waters below are murky and deep.

It is 1899. I am sixteen years old, a young lady. Three years have passed, in which I have perfected my visual signing, my writing and reading, and my ability to lip-read. My education is flourishing. With Lottie, I study English literature, history, geography, art, mathematics and the sciences. Father thinks one day I could attend a university. All this is wonderful and I love my studies. But the atmosphere at home is deteriorating. Father is more and more preoccupied with business, as well as the world beyond the farm. There is daily news from South Africa about the situation between the Dutch republics and the British settlers. It is a complicated state of affairs and at first it has no impact upon my life, here in Kent. I am young and I do not care what happens in a hot country thousands of miles away. I am aware of it from Father’s newspapers and his wrinkled brow. It seems he has some money invested over there which troubles him. The news is always bad.

Father explains it to me, that there were Dutch settlers there for many years, and British settlers came later. There was a war back then and the Dutch got their own way on controlling their colonies. Gold was found in one Dutch colony, called the Transvaal. Great Britain provided a lot of the equipment and skilled men to mine it. Everyone profited, but the British settlers have limited rights in the Dutch republics. Some are treated badly and cannot vote. Our government wants all British males there to have the vote. There is a lot of argument over trying to come to a settlement that will please everyone. Father says the Dutch, who we call Boers, are awful cads who want to make all of South Africa Dutch and boot out the good Englishmen who have helped make them rich. In August we hear that there are no hopes of a peaceful settlement with the Boer republics and that British citizens in the Transvaal are fleeing to the British colonies, particularly to Cape Town, which has become a chaos of refugees. Now there is a new word on everyone’s lips, a word that frightens me, even though it is so far away: war.

Father talks about the men on the farm leaving and joining up, that he would have no workers left, and what about the hoppers? He is worried and that worries me. Summer approaches and with it, the hop-picking season. We need hoppers more than ever, as this year it is an excellent yield. Sometimes he voices his concerns to me, but I do not know how to console him. His dour mood and Mother’s poor health are becoming a burden to me. I long for the clean, bright sea air. I long for Whitstable. I feel more at home there than anywhere, even my own home. I have never told Father this. I cannot explain it to him or to myself. I feel for the Crowe boys – the little ones – as I would for my own siblings, had I any. The whole family has learned visual signing so they can converse with me. I love them the most for that, that they would invest such time just for me, for my benefit, when they only see me twice a year, for my one visit there and their hopping visit to us.

Even Caleb signs for me. Each year I have visited, he has taken me on a trip to see the oyster beds. We talk. The men on the boat watch us but cannot read our signs. Caleb is not happy. He tells me things I believe he does not tell anyone, about his life, his frustration, his need for escape. I read his signs, my way of listening. I listen carefully, I watch his eyes as he looks out across the sea to another life he cannot have. I cannot find the words to give solace. I only want to confess the one thing I know for sure, and that is my regard for him. I have not had the courage to tell him at thirteen, or at fourteen, or at fifteen either. Maybe one day I will, when I am of age. But what good would it do? He is a man and I am but a child to him. He pinches my cheek and teases me. Sometimes he hugs me hello or goodbye. He says I am his special girl. He says he speaks to no one the way he speaks to me, that talking to me in signs helps him to think around a problem, to place it in space and time. He thanks me for keeping his confidence. If he knew how I see him, how I think so earnestly of him always, it would shame him and he would not tell me secrets any longer. So I keep my feelings to myself and build my castles in the air privately. Now you know the true reason why I live for visits to the Crowe home.

But it is not only that. I love to see Constance there and share time with her and Lottie. It is not always easy, as sometimes Constance cries as she recalls her fever. I do not tell Lottie about this, only the times when Constance is happy. We have never told the rest of the family about her. Lottie feels it would be too shocking for her mother. She thinks Mrs Crowe would not believe us, as she is a sceptic. And then it would only serve to upset her, as Lottie was upset by me before she believed. I wonder if there is a part of Lottie that still doubts me, and wonders if I tell her Constance’s words through lies or some trickery. Especially since, each time we have visited, Lottie and I make our pilgrimage to Reculver and look for Tom Winstanley. But he is never there. We have rambled up and down that craggy coastline looking for him. We have visited the wreck of his boat, his neat cottage, empty now. And there is no sign of him. I have caught Lottie eyeing me in her disappointment and wondered if I spy suspicion there. Why can I not see Tom? I cannot answer. I think only that those lost at sea may not return to land. We have even been on boat trips from the bay near where his boat was wrecked and scanned the waves for hours. But no Tom. There must be another cause. Perhaps some dead choose never to return. For now, it is an enigma.

As much as I value our visits, it is not always the jolly place I remember from my girlhood. Things have turned sour for the Crowes in recent times, too. Their business has suffered of late from falling oyster numbers, as well as changes in who owns their oyster company. They say it has been sold. They do have shares, but now they work for the owners rather than themselves. Then there were the three disasters. First, the Whitstable coast was smothered by an ice sheet that had broken away from the Arctic. They could not leave shore for over a month and when they finally reached the beds, almost all the oysters were dead. Two years later was the flood, where the sea raged through the town and left their neat home up to the skirting boards in filthy, brackish water. Then last year Mr Crowe’s cousin, another oyster man, was drowned with his third hand on their yawl when a steamer ran into her port side and capsized her. So much bad fortune in so few years almost sinks the family. Lottie sends most of her wages home every month, but there is never enough. I believe Caleb feels more and more a slave to his work and his family.

This summer, I have an idea. I persuade Father to offer Caleb a promotion, as assistant to the Head Drier in the oast house. Father considers this. He trusts the Crowe family and Caleb has proved himself to be a good, responsible worker every year. It is a sought-after post, a leap up from the hop pickers. He must stay in the oast house all day and night, feed the fires in the kilns, add the right amount of sulphur to colour the hops golden and maintain the correct temperature of the furnace at all times to dry the hops. The trick is not to let them dry out completely, but to distribute the moisture evenly. The old Drier is expert at how to feel and smell that the precise degree of dryness has been achieved, and it is skills such as these, with use of no technical equipment, only years of knowledge, that Caleb would learn. It holds a great deal of responsibility, for himself as well as the Head Drier. They both have beds there in the oast, as the drying needs constant supervision.

In the warm afternoon of his first day, when Lottie is visiting the rest of her family in the hop lanes, I steal across to the oast house and wait for Caleb to go on his break. I have changed my study clothes from this morning and put on a new summer gown, nipped at the waist with a bare neckline. I have brushed out my hair and pinned a blue satin flower behind my ear. Caleb appears at the door to the oast, his cheeks pink and hair damp from the kilns. He sees me standing, waiting in the shade of the cob tree. He stops and looks at me. He smiles. I come to him and sign, ‘Good afternoon, Caleb.’